In 1978, desperately overworked volunteer firefighters in a small mountain community in southern Norway battle 10 fires in a single month. Thirty years later, Gaute Heivoll returns to the village where he grew up and re-creates this true-life siege of terror. The result is Before I Burn, a ferociously readable double-stranded novel, chronicling the lives of two "good boys" 30 years apart: the author and the arsonist.
The fire chief has a single child late in life. Heart pains on the night of the third fire cause him to turn over leadership to Dag, his handsome fire-fighting son--who is secretly setting the fires they're fighting. Gaute is not yet two months old when the first building is set alight. Now he's putting together the pieces of the story that's haunted him all his life. Interwoven with his saga of the fires are his interviews, letters and diaries, chronicling his own evolution as a writer--in particular his touching childhood interactions with his adored father.
Characters glimpsed in old newspaper photographs are interviewed three decades later. Anyone still alive who witnessed the fires or knew the pyromaniac is questioned. Dag's aunt, his teacher and his piano instructor each come forward with pieces of the puzzle, trying to understand what could cause the fire chief's earnest, well-loved son to destroy the barns and homes of elderly people he's known all his life.
Alternating between Gaute and Dag, the narrative styles are so intensely subjective that some of the events depicted don't actually take place. Heivoll's shocks are sudden, contained in single sentences--an old woman runs back into a burning house, a silent elderly survivor begins screaming in shock, a car with no lights drives slowly past the house, a silhouette stands outside a window with a lighted match.
Before I Burn is an uncomfortably creepy, frequently heartbreaking investigation written by one good young man into the lives of three good young men--his Pappa, the pyromaniac and a cheerful one-legged boy on crutches--all growing up with high grades and hopeful futures in a small town where everyone knows everyone else's history, but not everyone is lucky enough to discover who he really is. --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: An arsonist terrorizes a small Norwegian village, and 30 years later an author born during the pyromaniac's siege returns to the village to understand what really happened.